Summary
This article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health proposes a new approach to hospital bed planning and international benchmarking. The number of hospital beds per 1000 people is commonly used to compare international bed numbers. The author, Rodney Jones, suggests that this method is flawed because it doesn't consider population age structure or the effect of nearness-to-death on hospital use.
To remedy this problem, Jones suggests a new approach to bed modelling that plots beds per 1000 deaths against deaths per 1000 population. Lines of equivalence can be drawn on the plot to delineate countries with a higher or lower bed supply. This method is extended to attempt to define the optimum region for bed supply in an effective health care system. England is used as an example of a health system descending into operational chaos due to too few beds and manpower. The former Soviet bloc countries represent a health system overly dependent on hospital beds. Several countries also show evidence of overuse of hospital beds. The new method is used to define a potential range for bed supply and manpower where the most effective health systems currently reside.
The role of poor policy in NHS England is used to show how the NHS has been led into a bed crisis. The method is also extended beyond international benchmarking to illustrate how it can be applied at a local or regional level in the process of long-term bed planning.
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